Gray Weathered Wood
by kindasortabatman
Summary: This is my first story, originally written by me and my friend, but she didn't wan't to work on it anymore, so... Caz and Carmine are best friends. They each have their own issues, and need to learn how to deal with their problems, and their friendship. Sorry I suck at summaries, but please read.
1. Chapter 1

Gray Weathered Wood

Caz woke up to the sound of his phone alarm clock blaring in his ear. Should I get up today? The boy thought. Maybe...Carmine will be happy if I do. I think I'll get up today. Maybe. I would prefer not to. I wish I could just never wake up. But I should, for Carmine. For Carmine.

Reluctantly Caz got up, got dressed into a black polo and a pair of jeans. He brushed his soot-colored hair using his fingers, letting it fall in front of his face. He used to love styling his hair. But now he didn't care even enough to push it out of his eyes.

He walked down the winding marble stairs in his admittedly mansion-like house. He hated to think about how rich he was, how good his life was. It just made him feel worse.

Before he knew it, he was at the bottom of the stairs. His mom greeted him and brushed his dark bangs out of his eyes. "A boy this handsome should never hide his face." She kissed his cheek, saying "Remember to smile, my dear boy."

Caz put on a fake smile to please his overbearing mother. He walked into the kitchen to find his father reading the paper with his feet up on the table and coffee in his hands. "Morning Caz."

"Morning Dad." Silence followed: neither Caz nor his father cared enough to say anything.

Caz found his breakfast on the counter. Anyone else would kill for that breakfast. It consisted of two eggs made into an omelet, 4 strips of bacon cooked to perfection, and a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. He didn't eat any of it. He gave the eggs and bacon to his mom's spoiled rotten poodle, then dumped the orange juice in the sink. His dad looked up confused for a moment, but then turned back to his newspaper. Nothing was more important than the daily news, even his child throwing away a perfectly good breakfast.

Caz stepped outside. There he saw Carmine waiting outside, looking tired from her long walk that she took every day from her neighborhood in the city slums to his wealthy country-club estate. His mother peered out the door disapprovingly. She had never approved of Carmine. She would rather he be friends with the preppy captains of sports teams whose mothers were her best friends at the country club. The only words they had ever said to Caz were "Watch it, freak!" when passing each other in the school hallways. Caz shook the thoughts from his head and went to join Carmine. They stepped off the sidewalk and began to trudge.

"Hola, mi hermano de otra madre." Carmine said as she pulled her maroon beanie down past her ears.

"Hey Carm." Carmine was the only other person who knew about his thoughts. His dangerous thoughts. The duo walked to Caz's car, a slick white Audi. Carmine slid into the driver's seat, and Caz sat in the passenger. Carmine threw her stylish Jansport backpack into the back of the car, and Caz kept his small black Nike bag at his feet. Carmine started the engine, and the two were off to school.

When they walked into the school together, the vice principal took one look at Carmine and snapped, "Take your hat off young lady!" Carmine took off her maroon beanie. As soon as the woman passed, she put it back on.

"Take your hat off young lady!" Carmine mocked in her slight Spanish accent. She rolled her eyes, and the two continued the walk to homeroom.

When the duo got to homeroom, they put their binders down on desks next to each other, and walked to the janitor's closet, the one that was rarely used. Carmine and Caz sat down, and started to talk, mostly about their fandoms.

"Superman would definitely win in a battle!" Carmine exclaimed.

"Batman is so much cooler, and he has kryptonite, which he can use to slow Superman down, and then beat the man of Steel."

"The Flash would win versus Green Lantern."

"No way! The Green Lantern would win. His ring, and he has all of the Lantern Corps too, remember?"

"Yea, I guess."

The two continued to bicker.

"Dick Grayson and Raven are OTP!

"But, as Robin gets older, he gets together with Batgirl, but I honestly ship him with Zatanna Zatara."

Just then, the warning bell gave a loud ring. Carmine slipped out without a sound, but Caz tripped over a bucket, and tried to use the shelf to get up, only to have his hand touch something slimy, and fall back into the floor.

When Caz finally got up, he opened the door to find an angry vice principal, and a timid Carmine looking back at him.

"Now mister Northwood, I did not expect this type of behavior from you, but from Ms. Perez I did," the woman scolded. Caz looked towards the floor. "Now, you are lucky that Ms. Perez took the blame for this, so you are off the hook from detention, but we will need to call your parents." The woman turned to Carmine.

"Now you, young lady! Take off that damned hat, and look me in the eyes."

Carmine obeyed meekly.

"Your punishment will be one week in after school detention, and I will call your parents, and you will never wear hats in school again," she said snatching the beanie off Carmine's head.

"Yes ma'am," the two said in unison.

When they got to homeroom, they sat down before the final bell rang.

After a quick homeroom, the friends departed for their different classes.

Caz has social studies first. He walked to the classroom quickly, and took his seat.

Stupid. I'm so friggin stupid. My life is so messed up. Why can't I just die? The world would be better off.

The teacher, a young man with topaz colored hair walked in. He was young, but plump, and short.

"Okay class," he said in a happy voice, "Let's get started."

The class just looked down at their binders and murmured a sort of assent. This was what happened in the lowest-level classes. Sometimes Caz wished he was in the honors classes with Carmine, but then he would remember how hard working everyone was and how it just made everything worse that first semester of freshman year.

The teacher lifted a marker and started to write something, covering up what he was writing with his protruding body. When he turned around to allow the students to see what was written, everyone groaned. It proclaimed in fancy letters, "POP QUIZ!"

He smiled ruefully at all of the frowning students.

"I'm sorry. This quiz will count for a significant portion of your grade. You should have been studying these topics all along, so this should not be hard for you."

Yeah, not hard. That'll be the day. Caz thought. He wondered what Carmine was doing in her fancy honors math class.

Just then, the teacher slapped a two-page double sided packet onto his desk. He leaned down to whisper to Caz, "I know you'll do great." Teachers were always saying things like that to him, affirmations because he was the kid who qualified for honors classes but stayed in the dumb classes because of some reason that no one knew and never got good grades anymore.

Caz took one look at the quiz. It was easy, very easy in fact. But he didn't feel like doing well. That would make the teacher put him in a higher level class. So he circled wrong answers and wrote paragraphs of gibberish, and then turned it in early.

His teacher smiled encouragingly at him when he turned it in, probably hoping that he had flown through the questions and scored a 100.

Caz just walked back to his seat and put on his headphones and drowned his thoughts in 'Panic! At the Disco'. He caught his teacher staring at him once in awhile, though as to why he had no idea. Finally, class was over.


	2. Chapter 2

Meanwhile Carmine was sitting in math class taking notes. She had worked hard to get into honors, while Caz hardly had to work and still got honors, but underrated himself into the standard classes. She felt bitter about this from time to time, but she knew that it wasn't his fault he was naturally smart and didn't care, or that she wasn't so much but did care.

"And then the value of x is inserted into the logarithmic formula, giving you the square root of i to the fourteenth power and finally (he scribbled some numbers and symbols)...we have the value of pi to the sixteenth! Now we just reduce it to the first power, and voila! We have pi." He smiled at the class. Carmine looked at her paper. She thought she understood it, but knowing her she was just a tad off on the calculations and such, and that meant a sad face from the teacher and pity: she was so close, it just needed a little work... but it didn't matter. She had gotten this far on the honors track, hadn't she?

Now was the class that was the highlight of Caz and Carmine's day: English. It was the only class for which Caz agreed to take the honors level. They met on the way to the class, and walked together in comfortable silence.

Finally they arrived to the classroom and took their usual seats in the back. They surveyed the room as they did this. There was a wide range of people in this particular class, everywhere from the honors track nerds with straight A-pluses to cheerleaders and jocks who needed an honors class for their sports scholarships to kids like Caz and Carmine, who were in the honors because they were smart.

"Okay class," the teacher said. She was a short and lean woman right out of college, one of the best teachers in the school as far as most of the students were concerned due to her humor and age. "I'm going to assign you partners for the upcoming project. Let's have…" she looked at her list of students, " Emma Brandon and Steve Douglas, Chris Englewood and Isabela Fang, Jonathan Horton and Melissa Jameson, Carmine Perez and Jake Marshall, Caz Northwood and Charlotte Kim, Sofia Quinn and Joe Shan, Owen Thornton and Skylar Vaughn, Albert Jennings and Iris Wu, and lastly, Bethany Graham and Richard Zabinski."

Caz and Carmine shot each other the same look. A look of fear.

"Okay, now meet with your partners, and we can go over the project."

Carmine tentatively walked over to sit next to her partner. Jake Marshall was the quarterback on the football team and was dating the head cheerleader, about as cliché as it could get. Rumor had it he got a scholarship to Stanford as long as he got a B or above in this honors class due to bad grades in previous English courses. He looked at her meanly. "Um." Carmine said awkwardly. He just looked at her. Carmine shut her mouth.

Over by Caz, it wasn't going too well either. Caz had a small crush on Charlotte in fourth grade, and as the years went on, so did his feelings for her. Nobody know, not even Carmine. Caz admired how perfect Charlotte was. Charlotte Kim was the debate team captain and led the school to nationals, whatever that meant. She was the also captain of the mathletes team and led the middle school's Model UN club. She volunteered at a homeless shelter every day of the week and still got straight A+'s on every homework, quiz, and test. She was fluent in Korean, English, and French and took honors Latin literature. Every summer, she went off to some city to study the cello as an intern for a famous cellist, according to the gossip. She was in all honors classes and took college calculus on the weekends. Needless to say, she was the teacher's pet in every class. And on top of that, she was one of the nicest kids in the school. There were worse people for Caz to be paired with, but he knew that he was nothing and a total idiot compared to her.

When Caz walked over to Charlotte, the first thing she said was, "Please don't ruin this for me. I have a 106 in this class, and I'm not planning on ruining that because of a partner who is in all standard classes. Not trying to be mean, but. Don't. Ruin. This."

Slightly offended, Caz replied, "I have a 102 in this class, and I would be in honors for everything, but I demoted myself."

"Why? Too hard?" she said with a smug look, though she did look surprised by his high grade.

"I don't really want to talk about it."

Sensing his tone of voice, she let the subject drop.

"Okay, then. I guess we'll do this together."

He smiled at her happily, having gotten his way. She just looked at him.

Carmine and Caz went back to their seats. No words were exchanged between them. Caz was about to say something, but then the bell rang. Carmine picked up her stuff, and walked away briskly. They usually walked back to their lockers together, but Carmine seemed different. Because Caz had no other friends, he waited for Charlotte. She was still gathering her supplies.

"Hey." he said.

"Hi?" Charlotte said in response, obviously a little confused as to why he was talking to her.

"So, when do you want to get started on our project?" Caz asked awkwardly.

"The sooner the better. I'm free tonight. The homeless shelter wanted me to take the day off today. I had originally said no, but I'll tell them I changed my mind."

"Okay then."


End file.
